That switch turns a mild-mannered, polite, laid-back father into an intense, hungry grappling machine.

A grappling machine who has won his last five UFC fights.

Bermudez is ranked 12th among the company's featherweights. Bermudez's match against Hettes is a preliminary bout, which will be aired Saturday night on Fox Sports 2. Preliminary action begins at 8 p.m. A sixth straight win could move Bermudez up to a main pay-per-view match in the future.

"My goal isn't to be on a pay-per-view," said Bermudez, 27. "My goal is just to win fights. Wherever I'm put on the card, I really don't care. I'm not in it for the TV. I'm more about winning and providing for my family."

It was television that gave Bermudez his big break in mixed-martial arts. Bermudez was picked to be a competitor on Spike TV's "The Ultimate Fighter: Team Bisping vs. Team Miller" in 2011. He advanced to the finals of the show's featherweight tournament.

During the reality show, Bermudez told the story about how he broke into the sport. He was a nationally-ranked Division I wrestler at Bloomsburg (Pa.). He gave up wrestling and left school to help support a woman who told him she was pregnant with his baby. It turns out the child wasn't his.

Bermudez was devastated and depressed, and he returned home to Saugerties. That's when family friend Joey Gambino, an amateur fighter, convinced Bermudez to try MMA.

"I told him, 'Forget that, and start training with me,' " said Gambino, who trained with Bermudez in the Saugerties High wrestling room. "He was a better wrestler than me and it would help him get some rage and frustration out."

Shortly after, Bermudez moved to Harrisburg, Pa., and joined Blackman MMA. Bermudez won his first seven professional fights. Three of his first four victories came by technical knockout.

"I remember watching the UFC when I was in high school and I was like, 'These guys are brutal, no way I could do that,'" said Bermudez, whose son Maddox will soon celebrate his first birthday. "Growing up it wasn't like I was a fighter or anything like that or caused a lot of trouble. I'd been in one fight where the guy pushed me, there was one hit and it got broken up, if you want to even call that a fight."

He was the one to walk away from a fight at Saugerties High, Bermudez said. Wrestling was Bermudez's escape. He went from a 97-pound seventh-grader on the modified team to a top seed at 140 pounds in the Section 9 tournament his senior year in 2005. Bermudez's 111 career wins are tied for second in Saugerties history.

"He was always a good kid and he was always joking around with the other kids," said Dominic Zarrella, who was Bermudez's modified wrestling coach. "There was no way I would have believed this guy was throwing elbows in somebody's face and making a living doing it."

Bermudez was a solid technical wrestler who was good on his feet and had great balance in high school. His conditioning was top-notch.

"You don't see everything he had until the third period," Jay Bermudez said. "If they did get to the third period with him, they were in trouble because he was going to pick up the intensity even more."

Bermudez has carried over that same intense style into the cage. Some fighters like to end their matches quickly by using submission holds. Bermudez prefers to ground and pound. He wants to break his opponent mentally.

This is when Bermudez channels "The Menace," a nickname that was given to him by a UPS co-worker in Harrisburg early in his fighting career.

" 'Dennis The Menace', the cartoon, is a character and it seems like anything he touches he kind of destroys whether he means to or not," Bermudez said. "He's always destroying things and that's what I'm trying to do in the cage. Get in the guy's face, not leave him alone, bother him and really destroy him."

Bermudez is out to destroy Hettes on Saturday night.

When Bermudez steps into the cage, he'll slip into the zone that Jay talks about.

And Bermudez will say to himself, "Game on!"

sinterdonato@th-record.com;

Twitter: @salinterdonato

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